Monthly Archives: December 2011

December 21, 2011- Even George W. Bush’s top strategist Karl Rove thinks House Republicans overreached in reneging on the payroll tax cut deal. His advice: having lost the politics, Republicans should wait until (or to see if?) President Obama flies off to Hawaii on vacation, bash him and congressional Democrats for abdicating their duties, and then … pass the same Senate payroll tax cut compromise they could have passed on Tuesday.

“I think the Wall Street journal editorial today hit it on the nail,” Rove said Wednesday on Fox News.

December 8, 2011- You have to give Rove credit. One of the things he does really well is confuse the hell out of low information voters. Here's a good example:

He thinks this could work at this juncture because the only details most voters know is that Warren has something to do with the banks and that she worked for Obama. So far they see it as a positive. If he can plant it in some people's heads that she's actually one of the bad guys (mostly through his surrogates in the press and presumably in the Massachusetts GOP) he can begin to chip away at her crusading image. They always used to say that Rove went right for his opponents' strength and in this case, it appears to be true. He's doing it early, while people are still learning about the candidate, trying to define her before she gets a chance to do it.

December 9, 2011- A feisty Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren shot back at Republican strategist Karl Rove yesterday — calling his second negative ad “factually wrong and morally wrong” after a University of Massachusetts at Lowell/Boston Herald poll found an earlier spot hurt her among voters.

“I can’t find the right words to describe how wrong that is. Factually wrong and morally wrong,” said a miffed Warren about the 30-second spot released by the Rove-backed Crossroads GPS yesterday.

“Karl Rove is not telling the truth, and I think anyone who is not telling the truth shouldn’t be running ads in this race,” she told the Herald. Warren has said she supports negative ads from outside groups so long as they are telling the truth, while U.S. Sen. Scott Brown has said he believes all outside groups should stay out of the race.

Warren brushed off her seven-point lead over Brown in the UMass Lowell/Herald poll — and her favorability dip.

The poll found that her unfavorable ratings rose by 9 percent due to attack ads.

December 9, 2011- Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren struck back at former Bush White House senior adviser Karl Rove Thursday, after an ad by the Rove-linked group Crossroads GPS attacked her for overseeing "bailouts that helped pay big bonuses for bank executives while middle-class Americans lost out."

"Congress had Warren oversee how your tax dollars were spent, bailing out the same banks that helped cause the financial meltdown, bailouts that helped pay big bonuses to bank executives while middle-class Americans lost out" says the narrator in the ad, referring to her position as chair of the congressional oversight panel on the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

December 8, 2011- Back in early November, the Republican independent expenditure juggernaut Crossroads GPS wanted to take Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren down a peg, so they cut an ad insinuating that her attempts to rein in big banks had put spark to the dry tinder in Zuccotti Park. “Elizabeth Warren sides with extreme left protests,” a narrator said over the squall of sirens. “At Occupy Wall Street, protesters attack police, do drugs and crash public parks…. But Warren boasts, ‘I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do.’” The message was in keeping with that of the campaign of Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, whom Warren is running against, which has been busy trying to paint Warren as an out-of-touch Harvard academic whose work on financial regulation was just too radical for the nice blue-collar folks of Massachusetts. Well, it didn’t exactly go as planned.